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Plan for backup and recovery (Office SharePoint Server)

  • Article

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Topic Last Modified: 2017-01-25

Backing up and recovering data supports many business scenarios. The most common business scenarios supported by data backup and recovery are:

  • Recovering from an unexpected failure or disaster — that is, disaster recovery.

  • Migrating data between installations as part of an upgrade or staging process.

This article will help you determine which scenarios your business requires that you address, and how you will address them.

In this article:

  • Disaster recovery

  • Migrating data

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery, which includes planning and preparing for how to restore your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 implementation after a technical failure or disaster, is a key part of business continuance planning and risk management.

When you plan for how you will use backup and recovery for disaster recovery, consider common events, failures, and errors; local emergencies; and regional emergencies.

Common events, failures, and errors

Common events, failures, and errors that require you to back up or recover sites include:

  • Accidental or inappropriate deletions.

  • Software updates.

  • Hardware failure.

Circumstances that take a SharePoint site offline are best dealt with by setting up a system with redundant components that fails over gracefully. Moreover, recovering from common failures often involves a combination of redundancy, availability, and backup and recovery techniques.

Local emergencies

Depending on your need for availability, you might want to have redundant farms within your region that your system can fail over to. If you do not have redundant farms, we recommend that you store recent backups offsite so that you can quickly acquire equipment, rebuild, and restore your farm in the event of a fire, flood, or other catastrophic event. A farm-level backup is often appropriate for this purpose.

Regional emergencies

To prepare contingencies for regional emergencies, you might want to have contracts in place for emergency server rentals in another region. We recommend that you store recent backups outside of your region so that you can quickly acquire equipment, rebuild, and restore your farm. As with local emergencies, a farm-level backup is appropriate for this purpose.

Migrating data

Backups are often used to migrate to a new version, or to move data to a different server.

Migrate data to a new version of Office SharePoint Server

One of the ways to upgrade is by way of a database migration. When you use this method, you back up and then restore your databases by using SQL Server tools. You back up the databases in the old farm, and then you restore them in the new farm. When you restore a database and add it to the farm, the upgrade process runs and upgrades the entire database. Planning for a data migration is part of the planning process for upgrading data. For more information, see Chapter overview: Plan and prepare for upgrade (Office SharePoint Server).

The steps in migrating a database include:

  1. Set the previous version databases to be read-only.

  2. Use SQL Server tools to perform a full backup of your site, content, user profile and single-sign-on databases. You do not need to back up the configuration or component settings (search) databases because you will re-create these databases in the new server farm.

  3. Restore the backups to the new farm.

  4. Add the databases to the Web applications.

For more information, see Migrate databases.

Move data to a different server

Using backup and recovery to move data to a new server is a common process. When you plan to move content between servers, consider the following:

  • Is this a one-time or frequent action? If it is a one-time action, use backup and recovery. On the other hand, if you need to regularly move data between servers, consider using content deployment. For more information, see Plan content deployment.

  • Is this a temporary or permanent move? If you are moving your content permanently to a new server, review the planning information at Plan for performance and capacity (Office SharePoint Server).